[8] Whilst he was a student, Clarke supported himself financially by renovating people's homes in his spare time.
[4] At the time Clarke commented: I’ve had a fantastic time at clarke:desai and I’m proud of all the projects we have completed over the years, but, as you can imagine, my media work has taken me in a different direction and I now want to start a new company that isn’t just about architecture, but also covers all aspects of the design, build and property development business.
He had approached a literary agent after being asked to write a book about architecture, not realising the agency also represented television presenters.
[15] In February 2025, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned an advert, for Scottish Power, which featured Clarke/.
The ASA received three complaints that the advert was not obviously distinguishable from Clarke’s Amazing Spaces TV series.
[1] In April 2012, Clarke was appointed as an independent adviser to the government to help bring thousands of empty properties back into use for families in need of stable, secure homes.
He has completely renovated his 1910 house in Notting Hill, transforming the interior into a modern home, whilst restoring the exterior to its original appearance.
[6] In July 2012, Clarke carried the Olympic torch through Camden after his brother-in-law Swiggy Drummond, who was the original candidate for the honour, died of cancer.
[27] In January 2014, Clarke became the youngest person ever to be awarded honorary membership of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Hon RICS).
On the day of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, Clarke, a nearby resident, was filmed by a BBC Newsnight crew (interviewer David Grossman), claiming to have witnessed an act of heroism concerning a child being thrown from an eighth-floor window and being caught by a single individual:Clarke: "One guy caught a kid...[the] kid was thrown out of a window from about the eighth floor, and the guy just caught him...it's amazing...Interviewer: "Really?
The investigation contacted the emergency services, which had no record of any such event, and explored the physics of a 7 kg (15 lb) weight being dropped from eight floors up, with expert opinion on the consequences of such a fall on the body of an infant, and creating a simulation using a bowling ball dropped from a multi-storey car park.
The BBC report concluded that they "haven't turned up anything that suggests this amazing event actually happened – indeed all the available evidence points to the opposite conclusion", and characterised it as a phenomenon called false narrative.